Old Guy Retiring!

After 30 years in the Remote Backup business I have retired. I have sold the business to our long time CTO, Pinku Bharathi, who has headed the Support department for eleven years, and the Development department for the past five years.

Pinku has been an integral part of the management team, and he is very comfortable in our corporate environment. I expect the handover to be smooth with little changing. You will still talk with the same people at the same phone numbers, email addresses, and website.

Pinku now has full responsibility for the company. I’m sure he will guide it to its next level of success with the same youthful vigor that I used to have.

The industry has changed many times in the past 30 years, and it’s changing now as we move to the “cloud”.

(queue old guy rambling…)

What a dumb name, anyway. In the past 30 years I’ve seen computing start out in the “cloud”. We didn’t call it the “cloud” back then, we called it “the mainframe” but it was the same thing – all computing centralized in one location, and we accessed it through cardpunch machines, those old Western Electric teletype machines, and eventually dumb terminals we called CRTs.

Then along came PCs, and the cloud evaporated for most of us as we all had computing power in our Commodores, TRS-80s, NorthStars, Apples, Kaypros, and Compaqs.

Later we moved back into the “cloud” again when personal computers became shared, like mainframes. We accessed small multiuser computers like OSM, Molecular, Charles River, and AS/400 through dumb terminals. We accessed CompuServe and AOL through our personal computers, turning them into dumb terminals.

As PCs became more powerful with better technology, most of us again moved away from centralized processing (the cloud) and into networked environments where all the computers were connected with cables and could share one another’s resources – a distributed and localized processing environment.

Then came the Internet and we all hooked in. Big servers were put online to do all kinds of tasks like data storage and computing, and some genius that I’ve always wanted to slap silly named them “the cloud” like it was some kind of new thing.

We’ve been on and off “the cloud” twice since I started counting. Now we’re back on for the third time, and the media are trying to convince us it’s something new. Again.

What’s next for me? I’m going to relax a little before I take on my next venture. I’ll play with my chickens and my ham radios (I’m W2RSC). I’ll get back on the water fishing for bass, and I will be available to consult with Pinku if he needs any advice.

Thanks for all your support while we built the Online Backup industry from its infancy back in 1986 to the juggernaut it is today.